Treblinka Survivor: The Life and Death of Hershl Sperling (16 page)

One night in December 1942, Hershl witnessed a terrible struggle between the SS and a transport from Kiellbasin concentration camp near the town of Grodno in Belarus. Some 2,000 Jews arrived during the evening. That was unusual in itself, because Stangl had insisted that trains come only in daylight hours. Nonetheless, Hershl was among the ‘Blues’ of the
Lumpenkommando
who had been sent to unbolt the wagons. The people inside had no idea where they were, and many began asking questions as soon as the doors opened. The very mention of Treblinka was enough; rumours had reached Grodno. When the Jews disembarked, they were met with the usual orders and blows. Once in the square, they were ordered to undress and then proceed to the showers. Some obeyed and had already begun their run on the
Himmelstrasse
toward the gas chambers. However, shouts now rang out in the darkness: ‘Don’t obey the Germans! Don’t undress!’

Spontaneous resistance erupted. Scores of people from the transport suddenly grabbed sticks, pulled out knives and attacked the guards. Some of them even fought with their fists and teeth, while others ‘had brought with them some revolvers and hand-grenades’, Hershl writes. Explosions and gunfire rang through the camp. The rebels attempted to escape. They ran, but the barbed-wire fence blocked their exit. The Germans and Ukrainians opened fire. In a matter of moments, the square was littered with the dead. Some were captured alive. They were later tortured. Hershl: ‘The punishment for the rebels was very severe … [Kurt] Franz deliberately kept them alive in order to beat and torture them until death released them.’ The rest of the Kiellbasin transport had by now been driven into the gas chambers, where they were murdered, many of them still fully clothed.

These events served to remind the Jewish
Sonderkommando
that escape was impossible and that physical resistance was futile. Although superior in numbers, the Jews would have to overcome a trained and well-equipped force of Ukrainians and SS units. Against pistols, machine-guns, rifles and grenades, the prisoners with a tiny number of exceptions had only blunt knives, spades, hammers and sticks. A number of failed breakouts that month blackened the mood of the prisoners further. Seven members of the Blue group had attempted to flee, but they were caught and taken by Franz to the Lazarett. In the extermination area, later in December, an informer thwarted the escape plan of 24 Jews. All the participants were seized and killed.

In yet another attempt, late on New Year’s Eve 1942, seven prisoners in the extermination area tried to flee through a tunnel they had dug beneath their barracks. Five of them succeeded in getting out of the camp but a Ukrainian guard spotted them from a watchtower and opened fire once they reached the other side of the fence. Two of the group remained in the barracks because there was no time to get through the tunnel. In the bad luck that often accompanies desperate escape attempts, the fleeing prisoners fell victim to a fresh snowfall that night. The German and Ukrainian pursuers followed the tracks into a neighbouring village, where they caught the escapees trying to rent a wagon from local peasants. One of the prisoners managed to get to Warsaw, where he later joined the ghetto uprising in April 1943. The remainder were cornered. In an act of desperation or courage, or both, one prisoner was shot as he tried to attack a German. The other three were returned to the camp, where they were tortured and hanged in front of the assembled prisoners.

In addition to the severe penalties for those who were caught attempting to escape, punishment was meted out to the other prisoners as a matter of policy in acts of brutal retribution. For every prisoner who escaped, ten were executed. Hershl tells us that only once did a group of Jews ‘leave the camp alive’. But then he adds, bitterly ‘The Front had demanded women. So 110 of the most beautiful Jewish girls, accompanied by a Jewish doctor, were sent off.’

Security in the camp was also strengthened at this time. More barbed wire fencing was added around the perimeter and additional watchtowers were built. At night, the prisoners were locked in their barracks, and the so-called ghetto was cordoned off and locked. Another deterrent was the simple fact that the escapees had nowhere to run. By the end of October 1942, most of the ghettos in Polish cities had already been liquidated. Few prisoners had non-Jewish contacts they could trust and who might shelter them.

* * *

Everything changed during the first few months of 1943. A bitter Polish winter descended. The prisoners’ spirits darkened further. A few transports arrived from Bialystok and Warsaw, but the level of camp activity decreased dramatically to about two transports a week. The task of annihilating the Jews of Poland was almost complete, save a few shrunken ghettos and labour camps that were associated with the German war effort. Nonetheless, the brutality continued.

In Sorting Square, the mountains of belongings that had been a feature of Treblinka since the beginning had disappeared. Everything had long since been packed on to trains and sent to Germany or the Russian Front. With fewer transports, food supplies dwindled. The SS and Ukrainians took all the food that had been brought with the victims for themselves. Prisoners caught with a piece of bread were executed. They began to starve on the meagre rations supplied by the camp.

The prisoners, who during the day now lacked full employment, sat in their barracks. Hershl writes: ‘Our situation becomes more dreadful every day. Day and night, we think about ways of avoiding our terrible fate.’

A conspiracy developed among the German-appointed Jewish leaders of the prisoners. The SS always chose individuals they felt were like them to be the camp’s block leaders, kapos and foremen. They chose men like so-called ‘camp elder’ Galewski, who as mentioned earlier spoke perfect German and had an air of authority, culture and intelligence about him. Stangl’s primary concern was that the massacre ran smoothly. He needed men such as Galewski to stabilise the workforce and permitted them a degree of authority over their own people. Ironically, the roots of the camp’s destruction lay in that strategy. These Jewish camp leaders included Dr Ilya Chorazycki, a 57-year-old former captain in the Polish Army and also a physician, Lazarett kapo Zev Kurland, Zelo Bloch from Czechoslovakia, the foreman of the workers in Sorting Square, the agronomist Israel Sadowitz, and Samuel Rajzman, the interpreter and accountant from Warsaw. Where Razjman went, Hershl followed. They formed a Treblinka underground, the aim of which was to acquire weapons and organise a rebellion. They called themselves simply ‘the Organising Committee’.

While a few prisoners in the early days made it out – particularly during the disorder and confusion of the first couple of months – it was now evident that individual or small-group escapes were no longer viable. The Organising Committee concluded that the only possibility of survival for the Jewish
Sonderkommando
was through large-scale organisation aimed at overpowering the guards, taking control of the camp and enacting a mass escape. With proper planning and organisation, they believed, the prisoners could stage an effective revolt and flee into the forest. No more single escapes and no more ten executed for each escapee. They would all get out or all die, they decided. If even just one prisoner escaped to bear witness, it would be worth it.

Camaraderie and trust also began to grow among the rank-and-file prisoners. In spite of the informants among the Jews – and there were several – the inhuman conditions they shared, the sense of their own loss and injustice and the growing suspicion that the work of Treblinka was coming to end, signalling that they would all be murdered as witnesses to the horror, bound the prisoners together.

The first plan, concocted during the long winter, was to overpower the SS one by one as they came to the tailors’ shop each evening to listen to the orchestra. They would then take their weapons. One of the prisoners would put on a German uniform and call over the Ukrainian guards, who would also be killed. But just as their hopes began to rise, disaster struck.

As February gave way to March, an epidemic of typhus spread among the prisoners, transmitted rapidly by lice thriving in the unsanitary conditions, in the prisoners’ clothes and on their bodies. The physical complications that followed were pneumonia, diarrhoea and delirium. Plans for rebellion ground to a halt.

The sick bay was now filled with feverish, vomiting patients. Witnesses tell of bearded, forlorn faces with half-open mouths, staring with empty eyes as their bodies lay tormented and covered with red, bleeding sores. They laid in unimaginable filth. At the same time,
muselmänner
, prisoners who moved like zombies, filled the camp in increasing numbers. Those who were deemed hopeless were handed over to Miete to be shot and dumped into the flames of the Lazarett. Hershl listened to the gunshots.

The physical appearance of the workers also changed at this time. The Germans were terrified of typhus and they ordered each prisoner to shave his head and body clean as a defence against the lice. Sick prisoners dragged themselves to work and feigned good health for fear they would never return from the sick bay. They were easily discovered during Kurt Franz’s enforced sports session, and they too were taken by Miete to the Lazarett.

The leaner, more active men seemed to recover more quickly from the illness than those who were heavier set. Hershl, physically always lean and in Treblinka more boy than man, makes no mention of whether he contracted the disease, but he does describe how the sick were treated.

As spring advanced, the camp became infested with flies that fed on the decomposing corpses that had not yet been incinerated. Typhus gave way to dysentery. Küttner now noticed an ‘exaggerated’ use of the toilets by prisoners, and introduced another bizarre feature into camp life – the
Scheissmeister
, or shit master. For their amusement, the SS made him wear a rabbinical outfit, an eight-cornered cantors’ hat and carry a whip. They also put an alarm clock around his neck with which to check the prisoners’ toilet time. Two minutes was the maximum. It was an especially cruel restriction for those suffering from the unrelenting diarrhoea symptomatic of dysentery.

‘Spite,’ Sam said again when I told him about the shit master.

By February, the transports ceased and famine gnawed at the prisoners’ bodies and minds. It was during this ‘quiet’ period that the workers were given alternative employment. The large clock face was put up at the fake station, the Tyrolean chalet was constructed as a guardhouse, flowers were planted and the buildings were painted in a wild mixture of unnatural colours.

Then, one day in March, a terrible and tragic miracle occurred. Kurt Franz appeared before them at the evening roll call to announce enthusiastically that new transports would begin arriving the following day. Survivor Richard Glazer recalled: ‘We didn’t say anything, we just looked at one another and each of us thought: “Tomorrow no more hunger”.’ He later remarked that he had relived that moment each day of his life, and every day he ‘died a little more’. For many, it struck them for the first time that their survival depended on the continuation of the annihilation process.

The new transports consisted of Jews from Salonika, which had been annexed by Bulgaria. The previous month, the Bulgarian government bowed to Nazi pressure and agreed that 14,000 would be delivered for ‘transport to the east’. These people were the descendants of Spanish Jews who in 1492 had fled the Spanish Inquisition. They were wealthy and the deception perpetrated on their journey to Treblinka was absolute.